School ordered to improve

A CRISIS-HIT Runcorn primary school that has had three interim head teachers in the last year has been told to improve, two years after Ofsted slammed its ‘culture of low aspirations’.

Westfield Primary School was rated ‘requires improvement’ when inspectors visited in June 2017, but a follow-up report published last Thursday said the school had still not made sufficient progress.

The report described ‘significant disruption to staffing’ since the previous inspection, adding that the head teacher had been absent for more than a year during which time there had been three interim heads.

The current interim head, Sandra Pope, was only appointed at the beginning of September, three weeks before the Ofsted visit.

The inspectors wrote: “There has been major disruption to staffing since the last inspection, including at leadership level.

“This, and initial resistance to the findings of the last inspection, stalled the course of improvement.”

In addition to staffing disruption, inspectors found teaching was not always effective and the proportion of pupils who were regularly absent had doubled in the past year, meaning children ‘are not achieving as well as they should in all the subjects they study’.

Westfield Primary School in Runcorn is having plenty of problems.

In writing, for instance, inspectors said pupils made ‘too little progress’ in key stage 2 and were ‘well below average’ by the end of Year 6.

However, standards in reading had improved since 2017, with most pupils now achieving the expected standards by the end of Year 2 and Year 6.

The school, on Clayton Crescent, teaches 136 pupils aged between four and 11.

According to the

Ofsted report the school is receiving ‘significant support’ from the local authority Halton Borough Council.

Westfield Primary School and Halton Borough Council have been approached for comment.